1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of information management. More specifically, the present invention relates to management of Information Technology (IT) investments.
2. Background Information
Ever since the invention of computer, enterprises, business or otherwise, have used computers to improve the productivity of their workers and efficiency of their business operations. In the beginning, enterprises tended to focus in a handful of high priority operation areas, such as financial management, general ledger, payroll and so forth. While these projects were often important, and the investment were not insignificant, but relatively speaking, the investment often represented only a small portion of the enterprises"" investment in infrastructure or research and development, and the overall success of the enterprises were not perceived to be critically dependent on these projects. Accordingly, except perhaps for periodic briefing for management of the organizational units that were directly impacted, senior management were seldom involved, and management of these projects were typically relegated to data processing professionals, and managed in an ad hoc manner.
Over time, continuing advances in computer and other related technology, such as networking and telecommunication, have made it economically as well as technically feasible to make available computing power to virtually every single worker of an enterprise, and support virtually every aspect of an enterprise""s operations. As a result, the number as well as the type of applications have broaden, from individual worker productivity, such as word processing, email, and the like, to mission critical operations, such as reservation and flight scheduling in the case of the airline industry. The typical size and scope of many of these applications have also increased. In fact, not only the success of increasing number of conventional business enterprises are increasingly dependent on the success of their IT projects, we have new business enterprises, such as Internet access providers, Internet portals, e-Commerce companies, emerging that are made possible by information technology, which otherwise would not have existed.
With the increase in significance as well as in amount of investment, increasingly senior management of these enterprises are actively involved in the management of their enterprises"" investment in IT. Unfortunately, while the significance and the investment in IT have skyrocketed in recent years, little advances have been made in the area of managing IT. Project managers, mid-level managers as well as senior executives continue to rely on a hodgepodge of non-integrated or poorly integrated individual software applications such as spreadsheet and project management applications.
Thus, increasingly there are interest and desire in having automated tools to assist management of all levels to manage these ever more critical IT projects.
A method and apparatus to facilitate management of IT investments includes, in one embodiment, storing data associated with performance metrics of a number of information technology (IT) projects, generating a number of scorecards for a number of IT portfolios, using the stored data, with each scorecard showing where IT projects of an IT portfolio stand on the performance metrics, and each IT portfolio having a subset of the IT projects. The method/apparatus further includes generating one or more investment maps of the IT portfolios, using also the stored data, with each investment map showing at least where a subset of the IT portfolios stand on a number of performance metrics. The method/apparatus further includes facilitating navigation from an investment map to a corresponding one of the scorecards for a selected IT portfolio by a user of the investment map through selection of a representation of the IT portfolio.
In another embodiment, the method/apparatus further includes generating a number of dashboards for the IT projects, using also the stored data, with each dashboard graphically illustrating one or more aspects of at least one IT project. The method/apparatus further includes facilitating navigation from a scorecard to a corresponding one of the dashboards for a selected IT project by a user of the scorecard through selection of a representation of the IT project.